Founded in 1984, the Tucson Weekly has become an iconoclastic institution in this sprawling desert boom town with a population approaching 1 million. With its reputation for diverse, compelling journalism with an edge, the paper has built a readership of...

Part of it is the recording: It sounds more professional. The drums are mixed down and don't have that ragged, recorded-in-a-concrete-closet feeling. The record has more interest in melody--guitars are used as paint instead of gasoline.

More by Michael Petitti

"No, no, no, I don't drink that foreign beer," legendary filmmaker/weirdo David Lynch chortles at the end of the electro-blues vamp "Sun Can't Be Seen No More." This being Lynch, the whole song is sung through a vocal modulator that transmogrifies his pipes into something akin to an asthmatic Donald Duck...

Portland, Ore.'s Menomena is a modern group yet to release a truly forgettable or misdirected album—more than can be said for most of their peers. Given the rather acrimonious departure of Brent Knopf, one might think Justin Harris and Danny Seim would have had to reinvent their sound...

A couple of years after his breakthrough sophomore album, The Wild Hunt, Swedish singer/songwriter Kristian Matsson has toned things down for There's No Leaving Now, but it's still a beguiling, dark work.

French-born Marianne Dissard left her longtime home of Tucson last year, but not before recording her third proper album, one that pairs ambitious musical leaps with greater emotional vulnerability. Variety has characterized Dissard's musical path, from 2008's L'Entredeux (written with and produced by Calexico's Joey Burns), which found Dissard channeling Americana through her French chanson tradition, to the bright and theatrical L'Abandon (2011) to two loose, off-the cuff recordings, made in Berlin and Paris with her small touring ensembles...